Typical Red Hat installs will have trouble with a hard disk as small as 210
mB, if you use a recent version ... and using an older one will introduce
security risks from apps that need to be updated. If you want to use RH, you
might check out the fexbox installer (www.fezbox.com) and see if it will set
up this sort of system for you in the space you have available.
LRP will definitely do what you want. It is designed to boot from a floppy
disk, load into and run from a RAMdisk and it will find 12 mB of RAM very
roomy for its needs. If you want to go that route, I suggest you download
the LRP "idiot-image" floppy and play with it. You'll need to add the
modules for your Ethernet cards, and I don't know fi there is anything
special you'll need for the cable modem, but the rest of it is just standard
routing, perhaps with IP Masq, and that's what LRP is made for. To pursue
this, go to the LRP Web site (www.linuxrouter.org) to get the disk image
and, probably, join the linux-router mailing list. As long as you don't want
the host to do anything other than routing and masquerading, LRP will suffice.
We'll be doing something similar here soon, though with DSL rather than
cable modem, and the alternatives we are evaluating are LRP, Debian, and
Slackware (Debian and Slackware install both seem to do better than RH at
accommodating small hard disks).
If you have "real" IP addresses to work with, the setup is trivial ... just
get the NICs working and use "route" to set up the host to route between the
LAN and the cable modem. Modern kernels typically have IP Forwarding
enabled; if yours doesn't, you'll need to recompile or find one that does.
If you need to use "private" IP addresses, like 192.168.x.x, you will also
need to set up IP Masquerading. For this, the HowTo is really the only place
to start.
At 05:54 PM 9/16/99 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I just bought 20 miniature (12" x 10" x 3") NEC 486DX2-66, 12MB
>ram, 210HD, for resale and would like to keep one for myself as a
>"server" to run my cable modem over a small 10B-T home network.
>
>Does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about doing this?
> I have read several How-To's, but could use a few pointers to get
>me headed in the right direction. Should I be setting this up using
>Redhat or LRP? I am figuring I will need one 486, 2 NIC's and 1 hub
>for a minimal setup.
[rest deleted]
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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